


Ginger Snaps: Memories

by Kount_Xero



Category: Ginger Snaps (2000 2004)
Genre: Canon Extension, Complete, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-12
Updated: 2012-05-12
Packaged: 2017-11-05 05:22:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 21
Words: 6,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/402884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kount_Xero/pseuds/Kount_Xero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This chronicles a few separate days and a week in the lives of the sisters before the fateful night that changed everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Game

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally intended to be a series of one-shots. The narrative of the story literally forced itself on me and hey, what can I do? I'm just a humble conduit, after all. And although this is one of my latest in the series of Ginger Snaps fanfics, this is actually the second one I ever wrote.
> 
> As with most of my other work concerning this fandom, it's viewed best in "Entire Work" format.

It’s five years ago and Brigitte looks at her sister, who’s just standing there with a large smile on her face, her round cheeks flushed with glee.  Brigitte blinks a few times.  She can’t understand.

“It’s called the choking game.” Ginger says, giggling, “You hold your breath.”

“How long?”

“Until you pass out.”

“That’s too long.”

“Not until you die, stupid.  Until you pass out.  Those are different things.”

“I don’t know, Ginge...”

“Come on, it’ll be fun!”

Brigitte doesn’t always like the games her sister keeps inventing.  Ginger always has a mind for a new game.  The choking game is a tamer version of the hanging game, where they tied ropes around their necks, tied the ropes to the fence and jumped off chairs.  Pam didn’t like that one bit, so there they are, with Ginger proposing an alternative.

Brigitte doesn’t understand Ginger’s fascination with not breathing.

“How will we do it?” she asks meekly, hoping that the explaining will stop Ginger.  Sometimes, it does.  When she can’t figure out how to play a game she proposed, Ginger huffs and puffs but doesn’t play the game after all.

“You’ll just take one deep breath and keep it in, like this,” she puts one hand over her mouth and the other one holds her nose.  “It’s easy.” She says.

“Why don’t we play something else, Ginge? I don’t like this game.”

“Come on, it’ll be fun.”

“Okay.”

Brigitte knows that she has to play.

“One... two... three, go!”

They both inhale deeply, and Brigitte tries to get as much into her lungs as possible.  This’ll be the last breath she will take for a while, so she has to make it count.  Looking at Ginger, she cups one hand over her mouth and with her other hand, holds her nose.

Ginger’s pale skin turns red in about a minute.  Brigitte doesn’t know if she’s like the same.  All she can hear is the pounding of her heart in her temples, her pulse racing out of control.  She starts to panic as her body starts to scream for breath, for breathing, for fresh intake of air.

Ginger stumbles, still holding her mouth and nose.  Brigitte can barely keep standing.  Suddenly, her knees buckle and she falls.  It startles her and she lets go, which makes her suddenly inhale.  Another breath, and then another, and before she knows it, Brigitte is having a coughing fit.  Her head is swimming.

She sits up.  Looks for Ginger.  Her sister is a little ways away, slumped against a wall.  She’s struggling.

_She’s dying!_

Brigitte rushes to Ginger’s side and grabs her by the arms.  She pulls, pulls with all her strength, trying to get Ginger to release her hold on her own breath.

“Ginger, come on, let go, breathe, Ginger, just breathe come on please Ginger breathe just _GINGER!”_

There’s a smile in Ginger’s eyes, like she’s having fun watching little Brigitte despair.  Ginger watches her little sister start to panic, grow more and more incoherent in her calling until finally, she screams.

“Mom! _MOM!_ ”

Brigitte gets up and runs out of the room.  Ginger watches her leave as her consciousness slowly deserts her and the only thought she has in her head is: _I win._


	2. Funeral Plans (Funeral of Already Dead Things)

“Which dress will you be wearing?”

“I don’t know.  Which would be the best?”

“I don’t think there’s a standard for that.  You can wear anything you like.”

“I don’t have much to wear, though.”

“We’ll find something.  Don’t you still have that God-awful black dress?”

“The one from Christmas?”

“Yeah.”

"I don't think it's any good."

"Why wouldn't it be? Damn it, B, stop bringing me down on this!"

“Besides, I don't think we should match our hair color directly.”

“So you’ll take a red dress, then?”

“And you should take a black one.”

“Works, I guess.  Shoes?”

“Heels?”

“Why would we wear heels?”

“You’ve seen the way it goes.  Dresses are matched with heels.”

“I don’t see any need to wear heels. Or dresses, but looking pretty has to have some precedent.”

“I guess... so that leaves...

“Coffins.”

“I’m pretty sure we get no say in that.”

“Not if we reserve it in advance.  Unless you wanna get cremated, but that doesn’t work so well.  It’s better to decay than burn out.”

“It’s easy for you to say...”

“Now what’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s the thought of my body lying in the coffin... maybe aware that I’m dead, it’s not...”

“Maybe being cremated hurts too.  You’ll feel your body lessen and lessen and lessen until there’s nothing left.”

“Thanks.”

“Just sayin’.”

“Coffins it is, then.  I don’t know.  I don’t think it’s very important.  Not as much as the burial site.”

“Is there somewhere in this dead-end town of dead-ends that you wanna be buried in, that I don’t know about?”

“In the woods, maybe?”

“Out of town, you mean?”

“I could be both out by sixteen _and_ dead in the scene.”

“We’ll be pretty DOA on the whole, B.”

“That just leaves one thing.”

“Which is?”

“How will we do it?”


	3. Bad Things

There is a boy that Brigitte notices, the whole thing about boys having cooties notwithstanding.  This one doesn’t, she can tell.  Besides, she’s too old to buy into _that_ premise.

She knows she’s not supposed to notice, that it’s all part of the breeder’s machine, this little mechanic of hers that makes her notice his movements throughout the crowded halls, but she notices still.  She knows that it’s a bad thing that she notices.

He’s got this wavy, chestnut hair that hangs around his forehead, beautiful nose and sharply angled cheeks.  Nice chin.  He’s taller than her, but he’s not built.  He isn’t a jock, a popular boy, a musician, or anything like that.  He’s just... there.

She doesn’t even know his name but his existence occupies a sizeable chunk of her waking life. Well, okay, at least the part that isn’t occupied by funeral plans and coffins and corpses and strangulation.

She often watches him in the hallways, or when she and Ginger are sitting on the bleachers, courtesy of a fake note from Pam.  Watches him stumble through the field, much like her, able to play field hockey but not liking it one bit.  His heart’s not in it, she knows.

Brigitte watches him, lets him occupy this space in her mind that she didn’t even know was there.

And at nights, when Ginger falls asleep and Brigitte is sure she won’t stir awake, she imagines a scenario, a thousand scenarios, where she can actually go and talk to him.  Say hello, make nice.  Then, maybe they can have lunch together. Maybe they’ll meet after school.  Maybe they’ll go down to the park and throw small pebbles at pigeons.

Maybe he’ll ask her name.  Maybe they’ll talk.  Waste words.  Have you heard?

Maybe they’ll fall to an awkward silence, and then maybe, just maybe, they’ll exchange that glance.  The mutual glance that isn’t accompanied by words but is deafening in its delivery.

Maybe they’ll do bad things.

Maybe after, she’ll tell him the secrets that kept her up at night, the things she couldn’t tell a soul.  Maybe he’ll listen and maybe he won’t.

Brigitte shivers and she knows what’s causing it.  The scar on her hand is old, but it still reminds her, at times like this, what happens when you do bad things.  It reminds her that bad things happen to those who cross Ginger, and doing bad things with that boy, is certainly something that would cross Ginger.

So Brigitte ends her scenario.  It’ll never happen, anyway.  So why even bother imagining, she thinks.  She tries to sleep.

Something in her head says, maybe she’ll say hello, make nice.  Then, maybe they can have lunch together.  Maybe...


	4. Curious, Yet Ashamed

Brigitte is curious.  She doesn’t want to be, she doesn’t mean to be.

Has curiosity for things she knows will lead to life.  Feeling alive.  Pertaining to life, the processes of making a life, the things that shape and move life.  Life itself, or like life itself.

She doesn’t have much room for life, so she doesn’t have –shouldn’t have- any room for this.

Looking at her naked form in the mirror, her thin arms and ribs, her pale, almost dead skin and drooping hair, she sees a corpse, fresh off of the autopsy table.

One hand slides against her own skin, cold fingers making her shiver.  A little ways below, and she’ll reach unexplored territory.

She has never been there before.


	5. Wild Weeds

The school, apparently doesn’t have a gardener.  This is okay with Sam, because it means that he’ll be making some minimal, extra cash, maybe just enough to add a little something to his savings every now and again.  Of course, this means that he’ll be trimming hedges every other day, or dealing with other micro-managing bullshit to keep up with their demands.  But a job’s a job’s a job, and it allows him to be at school.

No.  He doesn’t want to be around the school for _that_.  It’s not what everyone thinks.  He’s never hounded cherry and he doesn’t intend to start now.  It’s not that he’s asexual or anything, it’s just that he’s acutely aware of his status as the cool, bad boy drug dealer in their eyes, and being turned into a competition object, a trophy, doesn’t exactly give him a hard-on.

It all started with Trina Sinclair, he knows.  First, with a little exchange of pleasantries over a cigarette by the treeline.  Then, he started finding her in places he was going to go to – and, really, there were only so many places around the school that he could be useful about.  Things progressed to a conversation, which he caught on was mostly feigned on her part – he really didn’t think that a discussion about botany could really interest Trina.  Of course, she had her preferences in sub-topics, she especially liked his weed cultivation.

For the briefest time, Sam thought she was after free stuff.  A dimebag here, a nickelbag there.  No.  That wasn’t it.

One day, Trina made a move and basically put him up against a tree.  Her hands were all over him, and the sudden attention, however welcome by his body, made him nervous.  What the fuck was this? It was when her lips found his neck that he felt the need to restrain her.  Stop.  What is this?

It didn’t go so well.  Come a week later, everybody knew him as the cherry hound who only hung around the school to be around cherry.  So he could hound virgins.  Trina, strangely enough, didn’t stop hanging around and all over him, but he was under the impression that it was a game to her.  A game in which he was the prize.

Sam feels that he’s never had a stomach for games.  It is true that he has an ulterior motive for hanging around the school, though, but it’s not to acquire some tasty cherry – it is to feed the minor delinquencies of the kids there, who just wanna toke.  That’s fine by him – he has a mid-scale cultivation operation in his basement and his main source of income are these deals anyway.

Today, it’s lunch time, and he occupies the space under a tree, he doesn’t even care what kind.  He’s enjoying a cigarette, feeling the smoke trail down his throat when Jason and his two friends approach, hands in pockets.  Jason is looking around all nervous, and Sam rolls his eyes.  This isn’t a downtown, back-alley drug deal with leather jackets and possible undercover narcs involved, damn it, it’s a harmless, school-grounds exchange of money for goods.

“Sam the Man, what’s up?”

“Fine until a moment ago.  What’s your poison?”

“Eighth.”

“Fifty.”

“There.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake... he has the bill rolled up into a thin, rectangular shape and he’s holding it in between his index and middle fingers.  It’s so typical.

He slips him the bag, takes his cash and stuffs it into his pocket.  He'll unroll and iron the bills later on to straighten them out.  Easier than to just fumble with his wallet.

“Now amscray, you’re holding up the shop.”

They move, and Sam sees them.  Not that the school grounds provide for the most colorful or varied environment, but they are visible.  Like wild weeds on an otherwise beautiful garden – two shapes, wrapped in layers and layers of clothing, noticeable by their combat boots and drooping hair.  Red for the taller one, black for the other.  It isn’t just their outlandish appearance, all dark and bleak, but it’s also the crowd reactions.  People are visibly moving away from their path, or what they judge to be their path, and proceeding, after they’ve passed, to stare after them.

Sam uses the excuse of checking to see how many he has in his pack to linger a while longer.  Not that he needs an excuse, he’s pretty much the gardener, and it’s expected he hang around school grounds during lunch.  But his fame as the cherry hound dictates that he be a little bit careful, lest he come face to face with the school board or some shit like that.

Surreptitiously or in a fashion that he believes to be surreptitious, he watches the sisters as they eat.  The redhead seems to be having fun, poking, prodding and physically engaging her sister, while the other one (Sam presumes she’s younger) just sort of... takes it.  She seems subdued, calm and quiet.

A moment later, the younger one’s eyes dart towards him and catch him looking.  She looks him straight in the eye and all he can see is a silent wish to be away from there.


	6. Caught Staring

Brigitte’s eyes meet that of the gardener/drug dealer of the school, who’s smoking a cigarette and looking at her.  She looks him square in the eye, and he stares back.  He doesn’t turn away, he doesn’t have that condescending look.  He looks curious.

Curious about her? About both of them?

That makes her curious, in the end.  That she has caught him staring is enough to pique it for her – what...

“The fuck’s _he_ looking at?” Ginger snaps.

Brigitte turns away immediately, trying to hide that she had noticed, too.  However, nothing escapes Ginger, and Brigitte knows that enough to know that she’s been caught staring, too.

“Hey, the fuck are _you_ lookin’ at, greenthumb!?” Ginger shouts.  Brigitte stares through locks of hair.  The guy doesn’t flinch.  Curious.  You don’t see that in most of Ginger’s targets.

From where she’s sitting, Brigitte sees something that the guy doesn’t.  Trina Sinclair.  She’s approaching fast, her walk a little bouncier than usual and Brigitte knows that she’s zeroing in on him.

“Is that Trina Sinclair?” Ginger wonders out loud.

“Yeah...”

Everybody knows about Trina and (what was his name again?) that guy – people keep saying he forced himself on her.  True to form, Trina pounces on him, and the guy, visibly disturbed, pushes her away and walks off, the bouncy blonde in tow... which is when Brigitte notices the intent gaze of Ginger.

“Ginge, I-“

“What’s with the staring contest, B? Ya know him or something?”

“No.  Nobody does.”


	7. Search and Destroy

The people, different and foreign to her in their idle chatter, flow.  She feels like she’s standing by the river, watching the water flow and drag with it what it will.  In one hand, she holds the stones she plans to throw at the floaters.

“Search and Destroy.” Ginger whispers, “Go.”

Brigitte looks around for a viable target, her mind working the possibilities.  This is a game that is it’s own reward.  The mental image of these people, any one of them, dead and in pieces, entertains her.  It’s the sort of entertainment Ginger started, but it’s the only game of her invention that Brigitte enjoys.  She who comes up with the better, more plausible and possible death wins, but the true joy is to have played, so Brigitte likes to pretend she wins the right to play again.

Brigitte is good at this game.  She can kill ‘em like nobody’s business.

“Okay.”

Targets, viable, feasible, ready, delicious, vulnerable... c’mon, c’mon, someone, someone that’ll please Ginge...

So many of them, so many of the living.

“Ben Coleman.” Brigitte said.

“Interesting choice.  Thought you spared the meek.”

“They won’t inherit the earth.”

“Go on.”

“Ben Coleman.  Throat slit with a straight razor, his father’s.  Shaving slip-up.  Accident.  Lot of blood.  Spends his last moments remembering that he doesn’t have enough hair to shave.”

His blonde hair in one of her life’s reds, his limp fingers gripping the razor’s handle. 

“Cool.  But if you do Ben, you’ve got to do Tim Manners.”

“Not a problem.  Tim Manners, impales himself on a javelin while running to retrieve it.  Trips over his own shoelaces.  Right through the chest.  All the way through.”

“Ow.  Conscious throughout?”

“Screaming and arms flailing.”

Ginger giggled.  That joyful sound was one of the few things from before the Pact that Brigitte remembered, and loved.

“Wicked.  This leaves the final one, arguably the alpha of the bunch.  Jason McCardy.”

“Too easy.  Jason McCardy.”

“What?”

“Jason McCardy.”

“How does he die, Brigitte, tell me.”

“He’s pretty dead-end, don’t you think?”

Ginger looked McCardy up and down and smiled.

“They’re all dead-end.” 


	8. How Many Ways (The Lives of the Dead)

“How would you like to die, B?”

“I don’t know, Ginge.  I haven’t decided on that yet.  I know I don’t want to feel pain, though.”

“That pretty much rules out cutting your wrists.”

“I could slit my throat... but choking on my own blood? Not so much.”

“There are other places to cut than wrists and throat, you know.  Side of the neck.  Oh, and there’s the femoral artery...”

“No cutting.  Too goth.”

“Fine, sheesh.  Then, how about hanging? Do it right and you snap your neck with the fall.  Done and done.”

“What if my mouth falls open as I’m hanging there? I’ll look stupid.”

“Though you’d make for one pretty ceiling marionette... fine.  Cyanide?”

“What does it taste like?”

“It doesn’t need to taste like anything, you can put it in many things.”

“Will it make me sick?”

“Probably.  From what I’ve read, pain is common.”

“That’s a no, Ginge.”

“Jesus, B, what do you want from me here?”

“I don’t want to suffer.”

“Gun?”

“Where would we get one?”

“You’re so hard to please.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, lighten up.  That’s why I’m here, to help you figure this out.  So, fuck all that other stuff, here’s an idea: strangulation.”

“May work.  But you’d have to hang afterwards.”

“No offense, B, but we don’t have to go the same way.”

“Fine.  You’ll strangle me...”

“I never said _I_ would do it, I just said it was an idea.”

“Oh, and who are we going to get to do the deed?”

“Look around, B, any one of these cheerleaders would be glad to strangle you.  Or me.”

“But they’d beat me up first, which isn’t so good.”

“Hm.  You’ve got a point there, but... _fuck_ this is hard.  I get it, though, I totally do – I would wanna choose my way of passing too.”

“Don’t you get a choice already?”

“Yeah.  That’s sweet.  So, anyway.”

“I think we’re about at the end, unless you wanna jump in front of a train.”

“Not that I give a fuck, but after all the shit we’ve been through, traumatizing little kids who might be waiting for the train isn’t the best of end results.  Even if we get to die in the flashiest way.”

“Flashiest? Really?”

“I’ve read it somewhere that this girl hung herself from the mail post somewhere – you know that overhanging thingy on the rails, that the trains pass by?”

“Yeah?”

“So she had, like, post-its stuck to her entire body.  She was fucking covered in ‘em.  So the station attendant notices, right, and he’s trying to get her off when the train comes and slams into the girl.”

“No way!”

“Yeah! The rope snaps, her body’s thrown off, and these post-its are everywhere.  So the guy calls the cops, they come along and gather the post-its.”

“What was on them?”

“Every one of them contained a sentence, a song lyric, a quote, some shit like that.  One of them just read _NO LOVE._ ”

“Wicked... but it’s still hanging, and we’ve passed on that already.”

“Did you hear about the one where this guy apparently hung himself from the lamp post on the roof of his school, and he had this giant roll-up banner hanging from his neck, that read _FUCK YOU.”_

“You’re making that up.”

“I’m not! I swear, B, he had that banner right in front of the school!”

(cheerful laughter echoing.)


	9. A Lot of Different Reds

Brigitte has a lot of different reds in her life.

Red, some tone she doesn’t quite recognize, is her sister’s hair.  She spends most days watching those beautiful locks sway and wish hers didn’t resemble a mop.

Dark red is Henry’s shirt.  He sometimes wears it with this grey undershirt, and though not one to have much interest in that weird, brain-fucking thing called fashion, Brigitte thinks it looks good.

Orange-tinted red is the sunset, under which she and Ginger walk home.  It draws almost pinkish hues to the horizon, which clashes with the pitch black of Ginger’s non-stop chatter about graves and corpses and death.  Pale orange on the grey concrete, against her black boots.

Bright red of the parka that Pam sometimes wears.  It signals her need to get warm, which is perpetual and shows itself around cups and cups of red, scalding-hot tea.

Vibrant red, vermillion, dark and bright, is the colour of blood that is now spilling onto the white tiles.  It’s brighter the closer to the ground it is.

Red is the sound of the droplets.  Drip.  Drip.  Drip.

Red across the lips of Ginger’s smile.

“See? We bleed.”


	10. Kiss Kiss Kill Kill

In her sleep, the lines become blurred.  First, it’s the primal urge, always clawing its way up from the depths of her otherwise calm dreaming.  She doesn’t really know what the urge is – it’s a jumble of raw needs intertwined with unrestrained impulses and unknown desires.

In the depths of her frantic dreams, she stirs.

Then, it’s him.  It’s him right in front of her, in her room.  She’s ashamed, she’s shirking from him – she has never been there alone with someone other than Ginger.  She has too much of a mess.  She doesn’t want him to see everything – the dirty razors by the bedside and the half-made nooses on the floor.  The cans of gasoline by the TV, right next to the matches.

She’s just standing there, thinking of what she should do about it all when he walks up from behind her and embraces her.  She feels him around her.  It’s him and they did have lunch together, they did meet afterwards, they did go to the park.  They did do bad things.  It’s him and they are there.

She intends to kiss him.  She intends to kiss him with one hand around his neck, squeezing.  She intends to kill him, move on down from his lips and chew his throat out.

In her sleep, the lines become blurred.  There is no boundary between violence and sex, between want and need.  They all mean the same thing, they all end in the same thing: awakening.

The ceiling beams’ dark lines greet her upon opening her eyes and suddenly, the lines are less blurry.


	11. Night Explorer

Brigitte roams the room at night, her bare feet treading the cold, concrete ground.

She traverses paths in their room that she has roamed a million times before, following the same path that she walked on God knows which other night.

Ginger stirs, reacting to her shifting presence, which makes her return to bed.

Brigitte roams her thoughts at night, her bare mind treading the cold, crowded grounds of herself.


	12. A Sick Day, I

On the rarest of occasions, Ginger gets sick, leaving Brigitte by herself for the day.  This is one of those days.

Brigitte begs, pleads, cons her way through most of the breakfast, but Pam is adamant in her insufferable, know-it-all stance that at least one Fitzgerald should make it to school.  So she packs her things, bids a feverish and cranky Ginger goodbye and leaves for the breeder’s machine.  She knows what’s waiting for her there, and it’s nothing pretty.

For most people there, her sister is like a weapon on display – none but the most despicable attempt to fuck with Ginger Fitz, and whether they like it or not, the most prey sister –herself- is out of reach while that particular weapon is there.  Removing Ginger from the equation pretty much makes her an open target that is in the jack of anyone with half a will to take aim.

And in her school, everybody’s ready, willing and more than able.

Brigitte gets to her first class and goes through the motions with the full awareness that once Ginger fails to make an appearance during the break, it’ll be open season on her.  It’s not a coordinated effort by the whole school, thank God, but the likes of Trina Sinclair will more than likely make a beeline for her.

She hears a stray whisper behind her, wondering about whether or not she’s alone, which is met with a startled speculation that, yes, she is.  Fuck.

Brigitte thinks about her schedule as Mister Wayne just prattles on about whatever it is he has been talking about for the past twenty minutes.  Decides it doesn’t matter – the only possible repercussion is Pam’s anger and maybe a failing grade in this particular class, and it is no choice when pit against the alternative.

She chews on her pen and listens to Mister Wayne explain the finer points of suburbanization, anxious, even now, to simply leave.

She just doesn’t want to be there.

The minutes grind on and when the bell actually rings, it’s like the starting signal of a race.

“Just a reminder,” Mister Wayne says, “Your _Life in Bailey Downs_ presentations are due next week, and that is an absolute deadline.”

Brigitte is itching to actually be in the life in Bailey Downs.  She takes off, goes, fast as her legs can carry her, to the locker.  She hurries to make the changes she needs to in her bag, closes her locker, locks it.

Then, it’s simply a matter of navigating through the crowd, as fast as she can without breaking into a full run.

Brigitte doesn’t relax until she’s hit the street and is out of school grounds.


	13. A Sick Day, II

Ginger turns to her left, to the cooler side of the pillow and immediately feels like she’s this ball of flame descending upon a helpless block of ice.  Even as she feels her cheek settle into the curves of the pillow, she knows that it’s heating up.

Maybe this is it, she thinks, maybe this is the path to death.  Her entire body aches, her throat is dry and her pulse is pounding – the feverish world is swaying in and out, closer and away, as if placed on a gyroscope on crack on acid.

She drinks some water.  Only helps momentarily, and as soon as she swallows it, she wants more – there is a limit to how much she can drink, she knows.  Another method they haven’t considered.  Electrolyte poisoning.

Why are we always bypassing poisonous options, she wonders; why aren’t we going with cyanide and arsenic and mushrooms or plain old alcohol? Antifreeze, maybe.  Some of that cleaning shit Pam has downstairs.

A part of her answers: because you are the poison.  You have been slowly poisoning yourself and Brigitte for both your lives, and every day you increase the dose a little more – Franny Beckowit was simply the beginning.  The Pact was sealed then, and every day, you kill her a little bit more and you kill yourself a little bit more.  You haven’t really given any of the methods any consideration, because they will not kill you, they aren’t the ones to do the actual deed.

The methods of suicide, the nooses and razors and guns and poison are just the final chapter.  You are the actual suicide.  You are the slow death.

Ginger turns to her right, to the cooler side of the pillow and immediately feels like she’s this ball of flame descending upon a helpless block of ice.  Even as she feels her cheek settle into the curves of the pillow, she’s aware that she’s only trying to turn her back on the thought.

She sees light bleeding through the small window and wonders if there really is a world outside.

Ginger wonders how Brigitte is doing.


	14. A Sick Day, III

Brigitte finds herself in that limbo between school and home.  The freedom offered by cutting class is matched by the lack of anything to do in the meantime.  Bailey Downs is dead and buried at this hour.  Both school and home hold summary judgments for her absence from school, and she wants to delay that conversation as much as possible.

Instead, she decides that it’s a perfect day for a visit to the Mount Hope Cemetery.  Brigitte likes to go by there sometimes and sit amongst the stones.  Sometimes she reads, sometimes she writes in her diary, and sometimes she just looks at the names and dates and imagines their lives.  She enjoys spending time with those who are out of time; those, paradoxically, have nothing but time for her.

Sometimes Brigitte walks amongst the stones, her fingers tracing the cracks in marble slabs, and touches the manifestation of death, or just all that’s left of life once it leaves.  Empty block of stone, soulless and cold.


	15. A Sick Day, IV

Sam sits by the headstones, to where he usually sits, and lights up his cigarette.  He doesn’t feel anything about doing this – the gardener in him clashes with the sadness he thinks he’s supposed to be feeling when he goes there.  It’s simply habit by now, not unlike his cigarette, which is now in his hand.  First of the three or four he knows he’ll smoke.

“The black orchid is coming along nicely.” He says, “It’s a bitch and needs constant fine-tuning and injections to keep steady, but the outlook is good.  If I can get the results I want, I might be able to beat my old drug dealing business.”

He imagines a response.  Easier that way.

“I know you don’t like it, but it’s a business.  Tending hedges has its perks, but that’s nowhere near as lucrative as selling weed.  Growing it isn’t a problem for me, so it’s a win-win.  Anyway.”

The cigarette ends.  Another one begins.

“You know,” he says to the cracked stone, “I always tried not to be like you two.  I would be different, I would be better, I would be wiser, richer, quicker, just... more.  But no.  We all turn into our parents in the end.  I thought I could turn into something totally else.  I was wrong.”

He imagines a response, wonders in the response itself why he always imagines dissent and disapproval.

“I still don’t believe it was just a rather large wolf that got you, or a feral dog.  I still believe that pure silver saved me from the worst of it.”

Halfway through the cigarette now, and still empty.

“The Beast of Bailey Downs notwithstanding, I still think it was a lycanthrope.  I still think they exist.  And if you think that’s the weed going to my head, well, you’re dead, and there’s nothing you can do about that.”

Sam looks at the headstones of his mother and father, smoking his cigarette.  He remembers a night, so many nights ago and far away, when everything changed and he came to be there, sitting by the headstones and talking to the dead.


	16. A Sick Day, V

There’s a nine year old girl buried in the far end.  Once, Brigitte saw her parents talk to her and listened to the story.  She pays Mary Sue Lewis a visit and tells her of her troubles, of school and home and Ginger.

Today, after talking to Mary Sue, who is as good a listener as she ever was, Brigitte sits down under one of the cypress trees and listens to the silence.  The quiet is absolute and heavy with meaning in the cemetery, the eternal peace of its inhabitants bleeding out of the graves and dissipating into the air carries with it some secretive half-whisper.  Brigitte believes, just for a second, that if she listens close enough, she’ll be made privy to the secrets.

Brigitte wonders how Ginger is doing.

Then, she wonders what pushed Ginger to her fascination with death in the first place, the fascination that she has come to share.  She has come to appreciate death, the impending, undeniable truth of it, even knows the mechanics of it down to a t, but she doesn’t quite _understand_ death yet.  Maybe, she hopes, the silence will tell her, help her understand. She doesn’t have much of a choice.  There is no-one with her.

 _Out by sixteen or dead in this scene._ That’s the pact, that’s the meaning her life took since that day, seven years ago.  But what does it mean?

 _United against life as we know it._   But what is life as they know it? In reference to the death that they seem to be after, what is life? Is it a chore? An interim period between cradle and grave that they always have the option of cutting short? Is it bad things and pulse and all those unexplored territories and unknown desires, the eventual settling in of the Curse?

What is life, Brigitte wonders, and why is it worth living, or rather, why isn’t it worth living?

What is death?

Brigitte listens for the answer.  The silence doesn’t know either.


	17. A Sick Day, VI

Brigitte curls up next to Mary Sue.  This is her favourite spot to sleep. The soft ground welcomes her.  Her backpack serves as a pillow and her coat protects her from the cold.  She draws herself in and sighs.  Relaxes.  Mary Sue, six feet underneath, sleeps too, she knows, and it comforts her.  She feels that she isn’t alone.

Brigitte smiles a little.  She closes her eyes and sleeps.


	18. A Sick Day, VII

Being the groundskeeper in Mount Hope cemetery has its perks.  The dead have a pleasant company, as they rarely talk out of turn and are usually easy on the demands.  Every once in a while, one of them has a capricious spell and sprout wild weeds from their soil, but hey, those are brief and what’s life without a little excitement?

Another perk is that every once in a while, he comes to find that little Mary Sue Lewis has her usual friend by her side.  He takes great care to be light on his feet as he approaches, he doesn’t want to wake the poor girl up.

He doesn’t get why this girl does this.  Far as he knows, she’s not homeless.  Once or twice he has seen her doing her homework with her back to one of the trees, so she is a regular kid in the closed off world of Bailey Downs.

He doesn’t get why she’s there.  But, that’s not that complicated, it’s not his style to complicate things.  He doesn’t need to get it, he just needs to deal with it.  So he just does what he always does when he finds her – he goes back to his shed to fetch a blanket.  Poor girl’s gonna catch a cold.


	19. Ended with the Night

Brigitte wakes up, warm under the thick blanket draped over her, to the night.  Her sleep has ended and she has slept through most of the day, though her watch tells her it’s only four fifty.  Just a couple of hours, then.  She looks at the blanket and recognizes the pattern on it.  The groundskeeper.  She smiles.  They have this little, silent arrangement, him and her.

She gets up, folds the blanket, bids Mary Sue goodbye.  They’ll meet again soon, she figures.


	20. And When I Die (A Crazy Little Thing Called Death)

“But all that aside, what are we going to start with?”

“We can do the house ones first.  How many ideas do we have?”

“Three involving the garage and another three for our room, four if you count the no-comment suicide in the bathroom.  One for the shed, so far.”

“Nothing in the yard?”

“What can happen to you in the yard?”

“You can get stabbed with a pitchfork.”

“Or get disemboweled by the lawnmower.”

“Good one, B.”

“Thanks.  But that still leaves a few options open.”

“As in?”

“We should have something in the staircase.”

“Yeah.  Know what we should do? We should use that Christmas dress of yours.”

“The black one?”

“The black one.”

“I thought we agreed that we wouldn’t-“

“That’s for our actual funeral, stupid.  This is for our... I don’t know, repeated deaths.  I want the pennies on eyes thing this time.”

“The toll to Charon.”

“We good to pay?”

“Shouldn’t there be a note for that?”

“Oh, I had one here... yeah, right here, in your journal.”

“Ginge, my journal...”

“Relax, I didn’t do anything to it.  I skipped over the important stuff anyway.”

“Ginge!”

“I especially didn’t read the bit about those dreams you’ve been having.”

“ _Ginger!_ ”

“We’re sisters, B, the word _secret_  isn't in our vocabulary.  Anyway, I liked this quote: _Long is the way that out of hell leads into the light._ Real poetic.”

“I paraphrased it from a poem, please, give it back.”

“Alright, have your journal.  We should use that.”

“Okay, so we have pennies for eyes in also.  What else?”

“How many ways have we killed ourselves so far?”

“I don’t think there’s anything we haven’t tried, Ginge.”

“Yeah, well, there’s always room for improvement.”

(a moment’s silence.)

“I don’t want to die, Ginge.  Not like this.  Not in some freak accident.”

“Relax, jeez.  We still have a ways to go.”

“Out by sixteen or dead in this scene...”

“...but together forever, B.”

“Together forever.”


	21. An Epilogue: Memory (Forget Me Not) (Wolfsmond Redux) (Into the Lips of the Earth)

“Together... forever.”

Brigitte heard her own voice, felt the reverberation of it in the back of her throat.  A snarl, barely human, barely containing the animalistic, primal urges slowly choking every single letter in that simple promise, was all she could manage.

Her hand slid across the ground and she felt glass shards dig into her palm.  She clenched her teeth, but the pain, pure, was one of the steadily fewer things that reminded her of old days.  Of Franny Beckowit and the Pact.

Brigitte thought about Ginger.  Remembered her cold body, still and silent, lying on the ground she had treaded trails across during sleepless nights.  Remembered her beautiful red hair, the red lips around her smile and the reddish flush across her cheeks.

_Sisters, B.  We’re forever._

Brigitte curled up in a ball, her body shifting slightly with her every move.  Every muscle and sinew was aching, making way for the Beast.  For the Wolf.

She touched her chest and therein found the void left by Ginger.  The void deepened by Sam.

At the end of it all, whom did she have but herself?

In the sightless pitch-black of Ghost’s basement, Brigitte held herself and whispered into the dark.

“Forever...”


End file.
